hey i just met you;

[wingborne]

John is writing a joke book.

Knock knock.

Who’s there?

It’s the police. There’s been an accident.

There’s been an accident who?

Your father didn’t make it.

John sits down at the kitchen table with the men in starched uniforms standing over him, and he thinks, the punch line could use a little work.

--

When Dave comes home from work, John is sitting on the bed with his knees bunched together. He balances his laptop near his hip, leaning against the wall where Bill Cosby’s wrinkled eyes gaze kindly down upon him.

“Waded through a pile of shit at work today. Like waist-deep in excrement, an elephant’s diarrhea spewing across the room, rocket launcher full of brown nuggets splurting against the wall,” Dave was saying, chucking his messenger bag onto their couch. He grabbed a box of Lucky Charms and plopped next to John. Even as he muttered to himself about elephant shit, he plunges his hand into the box and scooped out the dehydrated marshmallows to jam into his mouth.

Today, Dave was wearing his soft red flannel shirt. John leaned his head against it, feeling the soft bristles move against his cheek as Dave’s muscles flexed for the breakfast cereal.

“Still working on that joke book?”

“Yeah.”

Dave props his head on John’s head to angle the laptop against the light. His deft fingers quickly scroll down the blank page, and he feels Dave’s throaty chuckle reverberate in his bony chest.

“You’ve got nothing done at all. This what you’ve been doing when I was busting my balls at work today?”

“I’m done with part of it,” John says defensively. “It’s on the USB.”

Like an ass, Dave was already opening up a web browser to check his email. John didn’t mind. He hadn’t lied. He’d finished the first part of the joke book before the police came, but he couldn’t really think up another good joke. They all sounded hollow to him now, like the audience always held a bated breath for the punch line, but the punch line had already been delivered. And it wasn’t a very funny punch line.

“I’m going home for a few days,” he tells Dave’s throat.

“Miss your dad?”

“Yeah.” John doesn’t say anything, because he wants to close his eyes and fall asleep. He wants Dave to check his email for his work schedule, and never wants to leave the bed again. He wants (wants) so much, and Dave smells like spilled cinnamon from his job and hot sun cooling down from his hair and something deeper and human, clinging onto his skin, and John wants so bad to escape the dull feeling inside him.

“Cool,” Dave says, the lump in his throat bobbing up and down as he talks. “Packing both our bags?”

“If you want. I dunno if you want to come.” He adds the last sentence as an after-thought, but the words feel hot against his mouth. He’s tired, now, even though he’s been working on his empty joke book all day, and he feels Bill Cosby watching him from above, and he clutches Dave’s flannel between his fingers.

“I don’t mind seeing your dad. He’s a cool guy.”

“Yeah.” John breathes hotly for another moment, and then rips the words out of his throat. “It’s his funeral.”

Dave freezes at that, every muscle in his body missing a blood beat for a second. In another second, he’s scrambling away to hold John by his shoulders and looks him in the eye, but John wishes Dave had stayed still and warm. He couldn’t see Dave’s eyes through his dark shades, but he watches as Dave’s mouth twitches, and then opens to reveal the tiny row of teeth, and then close again.

They didn’t teach this stuff in Boyfriend 101, and John feels icy water wash over him. He reaches out, sympathetically, to touch Dave’s face. He wants to tell him that it’s all right, everything was going to be okay, but Dave is already hugging him tightly and John lets him because he wants Dave to stop making that heart-twisted expression. He wants to find the right words to make Dave stop shaking, but he can only clutch the warmth of Dave’s flannel shirt.

“Oh, fuck, John. God. How- John.”

“Um, it was a car accident,” John recalls distantly. “They said it was quick. I called the funeral services, and I’m going to look for his accounts and stuff…”

“John,” and Dave sounds so sincere, like he was a child. John tried to touch his ears, kiss his cheek, but Dave’s throaty voice already broke a long time ago.

“I’m leaving really early tomorrow morning, because that’s the earliest plane. I booked two tickets, but you don’t have to come, I know it’s hard…”

“John, shit, what are you talking about? You don’t have to handle this shit, it’s… shit.”

That was a good joke, John thought. Using shit three times in a row. Perfect three-line set-up, ordinary, ordinary, inordinary. Clever twist of a word. Maybe he could combine it with elephant diarrhea. It would be a good start to the book, a step off on the right foot. They could put a funny picture of an elephant on the cover, with a surprised expression with its trunk raised, like, oh! The elephant didn’t know elephants took really long dumps, the commercials had only shown bears wiping their bear butts!

“I’m his next of kin,” John says distantly, thinking about bare butts. He was his father’s son. It was logical.

“I’ll handle it, don’t… shit, are you all right? How are you—” It was a little bit funny to see Dave lose his words so many times in a row.

“You should go pack or you’re gonna to forget something.” He gently prods Dave away so he could collect his laptop again, his hand still wound around Dave’s shoulders. Dave swallows dryly, and John made a soft discontent sound when he saw the box of cereal had been spilled on the ground. He climbs off the bed to pick up the crunched pieces, the ones not grinded into dust. The different colors of dehydrated marshmallows sparkle on his hand as he throws them into the nearby trashcan, and when he looks up, he sees Dave staring down at him with a gut-wrenching expression, his eyebrows scrunched together and his teeth lightly clenched, fingers tight against their blankets.

“It was going to make a mess,” John tries to explain, but Dave doesn’t say much more that night. They sit together on the bed, that night, and watch movies until the crows caw loosely into the red sky. Dave doesn’t listen to him after all, like the complete ass he was, and belatedly packs a jumbled mess of sleeves and shirts and jeans at five in the morning, an hour before they catch their flight.

John watches Dave yell at his boss over the phone at the airport, and then nervously poke around his metal studs to make sure he doesn’t set off the metal detector. On the airplane, Dave discovers he’s left his iPod charger at their apartment, and John laughs and tells him that he told him to pack earlier, but he knows Dave loves his iPod, so he says they could buy one when they landed. He expects Dave to throw a fuss, but Dave doesn’t say anything at all, just looks at him with the same expression, and holds his hand under the blanket for the rest of the flight.

John’s hand gets sweaty and gross, but he doesn’t let go, and watches Kung Fu Panda on the small screen several seats away.

--

By the time they land, John’s thought up twenty thousand mile high club jokes, and he’s disappointed Dave didn’t suggest a single one.

“I’ve got one,” John says at the back of the taxi, legs resting on their baggage. Dave plays with his draining iPod next to him, dangling ear bud curled around his neck like a white pale string. The reflection of Dave’s shades show he’s listening to Nelly, but they also reflect the passing Washington sights, the long highway to home with tall green trees.

“One what?”

“A joke. Okay, like, what’s better than sex on the beach? Sex on an airplane. Is that funny? It’s pretty funny, right?”

Dave grimaces, but it’s not his usual haha that’s a corny joke grimace. John notices his grimaces have been getting worse and worse since the airport, reaching from his mouth to his nose until he can see the corners of his eyes getting twisted up, too. Dave looks like he’s smelled something bad, like rotting fish, but the taxi didn’t smell that bad. Was it the joke? It had a weak set-up, but a logical mismatch, turning on the audience’s expectations. Maybe he could act it out, add a story to it, bellow it out with good acting. But, for now—

“No good?” John tentatively asks.

“Yeah, John,” Dave says, and his voice is gruff. “No good.”

Dave mutters obscenities as he pulls out the bagging from the back of the cab, and then more when he finds out the cab price. John sits on the bag while he waits for Dave to finish arguing about the price, and stares up at his house. He had moved away only recently, but it felt like he was visiting a whole new world. The shutters were closed, and the large tree on his front yard seemed wilting. He had thought the tree had been so big when he was younger, but he had grown taller and the tree stayed the same.

Maybe he should write a plant joke. An entire chapter devoted to plants. Something involving oak trees and leaves of three. The joke floated above his thoughts, foggy. He could work with the few scattered elements. Jokes were in the timing, like a flick of the wrist. He’d just have to deliver the punch line with gusto.

“You okay?” Dave wipes the sweat from his brow, exhausted from arguing over a non-negotiable price.

“Yeah. Are you cold?”

“Hell yes. Hell to the fucking yes, this weather’s messed up.” Dave had three jackets tightly bound together like a marshmallow man, and John laughed. A wind rustles through the old tree and along the creaking pogo ride, whose smile still haunted his nightmares of scabbed knees.

His house key turns slowly, like the house couldn’t remember its owner or couldn’t recognize its new one. He could feel Dave’s eyes watching him, but he doesn’t know why. To help reassure Dave that his house was safe, he flips on the light switch. Everything about the house did seem colder, though, than he last remembered. The harlequin statuettes lost their twisted grimaces, but they gained something icier in return. They no longer smiled with malice, but John touched their jester hats with a little bit of loneliness stirring inside his stomach. They were only statuettes now, distant and unmoved.

“Jesus,” Dave whispers between gritted teeth, staring up at the pictures on the wall. Dave flinches when John turns to look at the portraits, one of his father and one of himself, when he was younger. Dave stiffens defensively, but John quirks a questioning smile at him, trying to get him to relax.

“It’s okay, Dave. My house is pretty safe. As long as you remember to lock the door,” John adds, and dumps their bags onto the couch. The fireplace had not been stoked for years, and his grandmother’s remains still rested peacefully in the urn.

“Yeah,” Dave says, after a moment. He locks the door after him, the mechanisms crunching together in a perfect creaky fit. “Are you tired?”

“Nah. Oh, shit, what if there’s food in the fridge? It’ll spoil…”

“Wait, John, that’s not a good—”

He never heard why Dave thought it was a bad idea to enter the kitchen, since he already took quick steps there. The kitchen was just as he remembered it, except without the silhouette of his father baking pastries by the window. No bowls littered the counter, no cake mix sat conspicuously near the table. And Dave was being an ass, as always, because there was spoilable food in the refrigerator. But they were all neatly wrapped in plastic, and they seemed fairly recent.

He picks up a wrapped plate of fish, and turns to see Dave watching him from the doorway.

“We can have this for dinner,” John explains, but it was like he didn’t explain anything at all, because Dave mutters that he has to make a call and leaves. Probably to his boss again. They were arguing about sick days and stuff, but John didn’t know too much about that. He didn’t really care.

He opens the cabinet to find some boxes of cereal, and smiles faintly because he knows his father was much too adult to consume such childish things. They must have been sitting there, waiting for him to visit. Dave would be happy. They would have a proper dinner tonight, and not just adult fish and adult food.

Dave hadn’t lived in the house, so he didn’t know the kitchen had a side-door, where John could hear Dave pacing outside and talking on the phone. He couldn’t hear well, but fragments of an anguished voice seeped through the cracks of the windows.

“Shit, Rose, he’s not saying… at all, it’s… fucking… I don’t know…”

John rips open the top of the cereal box. The pliant cardboard tells him that he was not a winner.

“I don’t… what to say, and… Should I…”

He pops open the plastic bag and sat on the chair, swallowing fistfuls of dried Cheerios. They run down harsh in his throat, but he didn’t want milk.

“Maybe… talk to you, you’d know… this shit, and…”

John views the kitchen, and thinks this was what he had to get used to. He’d inherit the house, of course. He knew that even without the lawyer talking to him in the sotto voice on the phone. He knew he would inherit everything his father had, and everything his father had carefully prepared for this day.

“Fuck, Rose,” and suddenly Dave sounded clear and high, broken and edged with worry, “Is something wrong with him?”

When he puts away the cereal box, he accidentally cuts his finger across the open top. He sucks at the blood rolling off his thumb, and thought up a callback to the oak joke.

It wasn’t a very funny joke.

--

The funeral inched along, approaching with every X on the calendar. John sits in his father’s bedroom and sorts out the financial papers, hidden in the safe. As he expected, his father’s room felt hallowed and sacred to the touch. He wouldn’t mess around in the room, he promised himself. Since they arrived, Dave slept in the same childhood bed, curling almost like a cat and cradling John at night, when he thought John was asleep. Dave complained about the movie posters staring at him, but he never took them down.

His father’s room had gray walls, and a solemn professional air neatly pressed down upon the papers. John sorted through the various ties, and a collection of official wallets. His father’s PDA still occasionally beeped with his friends offering condolences, and John returned the condolences with a struggle for capital letters and proper punctuation. His father had been a great man, especially in terms of financial business. His will, straightforward, leaving everything to John.

“Made myself a sandwich,” Dave says from the doorway. Though his face remained inscrutable behind his shades, John smiled gently at the tuna fish salad sandwich neatly cut into two, half respectfully designated for each of them. Dave had been careful in making enough food for two, but John was eating fine.

“Thanks, Dave.”

“Shit, no, this glorious sandwich belongs in the Smithsonian, not your spelunking mouth,” Dave says, sitting down on the bed and passing him half the sandwich. John obligingly bites into the wheat, scraps of lettuce spilling down his lap.

“Have you got your suit ready?” For the funeral. At least Dave had stopped flinching around the word.

“Yeah. All gray and crap. It’s a refrigerator ruptured a moldy spleen all over me.”

“Gross,” John says, laughing. “I think my dad left behind enough money so you don’t have to deal with your shitty boss for a while.”

“I still have my job,” Dave says defensively, but he slides down to sit next to John. He doesn’t say anything, staring down at the papers piled across from the safe, where the official documents had been wined and dined with curling script and stamps from the government.

“Yeah. Hey, I think I thought up a good joke.”

“For your book?” Dave curls his lip.

“It goes like, money doesn’t grow on trees, but trees make money! D’you think that’s good?”

“Doesn’t even make sense.”

“It makes sense,” John mumbles, but even he has to admit it didn’t sound very funny. He scratches it off his paper, and resumes piling the papers together. A small card flutters out, like a white butterfly, and lands close to Dave’s sloppy sandwich. Dave slips it between his fingers, twirling it dexterously between his thumbs, and then reads it.

John had known Dave long enough to tell when his expression changed. Even though Dave still wore the poker face, his shoulders stiffened and his fingers flexed.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Dave says, but John pries the card away from Dave’s hands. It is, as he expected, another card from his father. He rolls his eyes, but tucks it away into the official papers.

“I keep finding them. It’s super annoying.”

“Annoying?”

“He didn’t really mean it,” John says, standing up and tugging at his vest. Puns were a good source of jokes. Maybe he could go like, he was invested in the plans. Get it? Vest, invest? But even he could tell a stinking joke from a good one. Word players were clever, but they had a limit of annoyance.

“He meant it. Your dad was proud of you,” Dave says. He had flung one arm out over his raised knee, his wrist hanging loosely. An inch of his drawl hung over his words, tense, waiting.

“He said it a lot! But he didn’t mean it. God, Dave, don’t get me wrong,” John says, holding out his hands like a captured criminal on film. “He is… was, the best dad ever, okay? But I never really did anything to make him proud. He just said it a lot.”

“John—”

“Dave,” John repeats, his voice lilting. Something fragile spread across the room like a gossamer web of emotions, tethered in shitty tuna fish salad sandwiches. Though he couldn’t see Dave’s eyes behind the shades, he met his gaze firmly.

“Yeah. Okay. Whatever.” Dave turns away first, tearing into his sandwich aggressively. John sympathetically sits on the bed, running his fingers through the short strands of Dave’s hair, because Dave had been having a hard time. It must have been hard. He had argued to take care of some financial straits, met with the lawyer several times, helped pick out flowers to the funeral, and then had to sleep in a small bed surrounded by awesome movie posters.

“Sorry,” John murmurs, though something uncertain lingers in his stomach.

“You know,” Dave says, and wets his lips. “You know, you can talk to me. Stuff like that. If you’re feeling down, sinking worse than a log flushed down the porcelain throne—”

“I know, Dave, jeez. I know you called Rose and I know you want me to talk to her and I know.” John kisses Dave’s forehead, a brief touch, but enough for Dave’s hand to curl around his wrist.

“Maybe I’m just being a shitty boyfriend,” Dave finally says, his voice peeling away from himself, raw and empty. John didn’t speak for a long moment, careful about the words sliding across his tongue. He knew Dave didn’t always feel good. He could see what Dave couldn’t see, like how Dave always sat next to him when he returned from work, how Dave wanted to hold hands but wouldn’t say it, how Dave watched all the movies he hated because he didn’t want to sit in the next room and wait. Dave’s bones were knit together with want, and John knew he never wanted to admit the hollowness in the space between his bones.

“You’re the best,” John promises. He runs his fingers down Dave’s skinny neck, the bulges of his spine, where they curved away from him.

“Yeah—”

“Shut up, Dave, I’m talking. You’re the best and there’s nothing I’d tell Rose that I wouldn’t tell you and you’re the best. I promise. I know you think I’m weird I’m not saying sad stuff, but, I dunno. I’m not not saying stuff to you because I don’t trust you. It’s just we’ve got stuff to do. You’re fine. We’re fine.” He didn’t quite kiss him, but buries his face into Dave’s hair, which smells like lime shampoo and limp conditioner, and he touches Dave’s fingers to wash away the bruises in their hearts.

Eventually, Dave reluctantly gets up, mumbling something about cleaning up the dishes. John finishes with the financial papers, and they eat a quiet dinner. That night, as they fall asleep on the childish sheets, John could have sworn he felt Dave mouth thank you against his skin, but he falls asleep and dreams about Matthew McConaughey shaking his hand and telling him that he’s sorry for his loss.

--

The weather is overcast, and John can’t remember faces. He remembers the colors of their suits, inky black and threaded gray. He feels people touching his shoulders, telling him they were sorry, and he can feel Dave defensively hovering around him, chewing on the offered refreshments with the brutality of a lion on a hunt. In a strange twist of fate, he receives enough baked goods to last them for weeks, even if Dave flinches at every muffin delivered in a basket. John thinks, at first, Dave doesn’t like muffins, but he notices Dave looks at him almost pleadingly with each pastry.

Rose arrives on time, hair pinned up elegantly. She exchanges kisses with him and draws him away, and as he expects, offers her services, should he require a lending ear. But he keeps his promise, and only hugs her. She smells warm and like lavender, and she holds onto his back even after he lets go.

Jade arrives late, her hair in a flurry around her waist. She had arrived from halfway across the world, and even though John insists she didn’t need to come, she throws herself around his shoulders and hugs him so tightly, John can feel his lips turning blue. She wants to talk to him privately, but the ceremony begins and she clutches at his hand like she’s afraid of letting go.

It’s long, and boring, and when it’s John’s turn to view the casket, he approaches with the sense a thousand eyes watch him expectantly. In turn, his eyes mostly follow along the bright red and white flowers lying on the bottom half of the casket. They seem extraordinarily bright, just like the whispers seem extraordinarily loud. He had made a bad decision with the flowers, and his face tightens slightly because of it.

It’s not the first time he’s seen his father, but it’s the last. He stares down at the body with a sense of detachment, feeling the wind press against his hair and across the tightened buttons of his dark suit. His father lays there, almost asleep, hands folded across his perfectly neat suit. His tie is dark, and his hat is sharp. The bulge of his wallet still presses against his chest, and his pipe lies next to him.

John tries to study his father’s face, to memorize the features into his memory before it all disappears into the ground, but his eyes keep sliding off to the shape of his father’s hands, to the bulkiness of his shoulders. His father seems smaller, like the tree in his yard, now that he’s older. He wonders if the wrinkles in his father’s skin were always there, if the veins always protruded or if the people at the funeral home simply did good work. He can smell the waft of cologne, and it smells wrong. His father smells like cake and smoke, not cologne.

But it was a bad route to take, because John can’t stop noticing the little wrong things about the small body lying in front of him. The cuffs were lined too properly, where his father rolled up his sleeves to mix the cake. The hat should have been sitting squarely on his head, and not almost embarrassingly tilted. He wants to fix the hat, but then he would need to fix the pipe, and then the suit, and he turns away.

The eyes stare at him as he climbs the steps to deliver the eulogy, and his hair is plastered against his forehead. His mouth is dry, but he chokes through the written speech. When he occasionally looks up, like a proper public speaker, he can see the audience waiting for him. He sees his father’s friends from a world far away, who knew a different side of his father. He licks his chapped lips, and works his jaw in the small pauses.

The sky is gray, and the air is cold.

When he sits down again, Dave mumbles something about how he’s glad John didn’t do a stupid joke.

“It’s a short eulogy. I wouldn’t have time to do a good set-up, and the punch line isn’t funny without a good set-up.”

When the first thump of dirt hits the closed casket, John watches his father disappear.

Dave doesn’t say anything for the rest of the ceremony, his silent knight who lurks around the corners and attacks viciously at every mention of cookies. His lips curl whenever another person approaches, to say how much his father talked about him, to apologize for his loss, to offer their services. John shakes their hands, and drinks his punch, and waits for the night to be over.

--

It’s the day before they leave back to their apartment. John doesn’t know whether or not he should sell the house, even though Dave petitions adamantly against it. He doesn’t understand the big deal, but Dave only shoves his hands into his pockets and mutters something about nice sewage here.

Dave sits at the kitchen table, reading the funnies in the comic and circling the worst ones. John has opened up his laptop for the first time in weeks, stretching his fingers until his knuckles press white against his skin.

“Still working on that joke book?”

“It’s coming along,” John says nonchalantly. The blank pages blinked up at him blearily, condescending against his lies.

“You’ve been obsessed with that thing.”

“It’s important,” John insists. He fiddles around with the USB, opening up his word document. He slumps down on the table, where he spilled his food and scraped around his dishes, and stares up at the glowing laptop screen. Dave mumbles to himself as he circles another Garfield comic.

“Maybe that thing’s just a pipe dream,” Dave finally says, turning the newspaper page with his ink-smudged hands.

John’s mouth quirks up. A pipe dream. Like his father’s pipe. That was funny.

“Seriously, just tie it up. You’ve been obsessing way too long.”

Tie. Like his father’s ties. He struggles to keep his smile under control, but Dave has his bent over the editorials and doesn’t notice.

“Control S and get out of that thing. You haven’t cracked a good corny joke for decades. Trust me, close that thing up, and it’ll be business as usual.”

Business, because his father’s a businessman, and John bursts out into hysterical laughter. Dave starts, but John can’t stop, because he has fingers over his aching rib cage and he knocks his head at the corner of the table as he bends over in his chair. His breath escapes him, his laughter runs away and spirals around his throat, and he’s drowning in his breathless chuckles. He has tears in his eyes because that’s the funniest thing he’s heard in weeks, and he can feel Dave trying to pull him away, but can’t he see, this whole thing was hilarious?

He’s sobbing and laughing, burying his face into his hands, glasses askew. He can’t catch his breath, so he’s wheezing out laughter. It was funny. The whole thing was funny, and the tears hit his jeans like small rocks, hot and warm, melting into his skin, flooding his hands, wrenched out of his gut and he was crying like a small child, because it was so funny, it was too funny.

He cries with want, he wants so bad and he wants so much for his dad to come back home, because the house is too big and the harlequin statues are too cold and the kitchen smells too much like mayonnaise and apple juice and not enough like cake and his dad put bandages on his scraped knees from the pogo ride outside that had grown so small, his dad had seemed so small within the casket, the flowers too bright, and he screamed into his hands because his dad waited for him at home with cereal boxes he never ate and he worked hard for a money to will upon his son and because he carefully sat up at night to write letters about how proud he was, how proud, but John knew inside the terrible, terrible truth, and John Egbert was a broken creature of want and he wanted to earn his dad pride so much, to actually earn it, he wanted it so badly, to be fix his broken hollow bones, but he can never talk to his father again, and this cold hard truth slams into his mind and shatters him into pieces.

Even as he screams into his hands, his tears drip down his short nails and splatters across the cold tiled floor because John Egbert had too many broken parts in him and the egg couldn’t be pieced back together and his dad was a corpse in the ground and he couldn’t write a funny joke about it and his dad taught him how to play the piano and took him to school and wrote letters to him from home and he had always been there for him and now something fundamental foundational functional had been torn apart and he only had himself to blame, all the regrets in his body, all the longing for time to reverse, for the car to miss that single inch for that day to go back in time for that phone call to be made so he could tell his dad that he loved him, and he screamed until his throat was torn and hoarse and his vision hot and blurred and he knew what he had written, what the first words in his unfinished joke book would have been, and he cries out all the tears inside him because he misses his dad.

this book is dedicated to my dad!
i hope this makes you proud.